Design-for-manufacturing (DFM) is a developmental practice emphasizing manufacturing issues throughout the product development process. Successful DFM results in lower production cost without sacrificing product quality. The concept of DFM has been widely adopted in the manufacturing industry, particularly in the manufacturing of integrated circuits.
Typically, in the design process of integrated circuits, the layouts of the integrated circuits are generated by designers. To fix hotspots and improve the layouts of the circuits, the foundry for manufacturing the integrated circuits may provide a utility for the designers to do DFM checks, so that the hotspots and un-optimized layout patterns may be found, and may be fixed by the designers. To inform the designers the locations of the potential problems, the utility typically makes location markers on the layouts to indicate where the problems are.
The conventional methods, however, were not efficient for the problem fixing. Since the location markers are only capable of providing the information related to the locations, while the other required information for successfully fixing the problems were not provided, the designers may over-fix or under-fix the problems. Furthermore, the foundries may have to provide the designers with the principles of the DFM checks for the designers to fix the problems. Therefore, the conventional methods also can lead to the leak in trade secret.